Selling black places on Airbnb: Colonial discourse and the marketing of black communities in New York City

Petter Törnberg*, Letizia Chiappini

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

26 Citations (Scopus)
43 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Airbnb has recently become a growing topic of both concern and interest for urban researchers, policymakers, and activists. Previous research has emphasized Airbnb’s economic impact and its role as a driver of residential gentrification, but Airbnb also fosters place entrepreneurs, geared to extract value from a global symbolic economy by marketing the urban frontier to a transnational middle class. This emphasizes the cultural impact of Airbnb on cities, and its power of symbolizing and communicating who belongs in specific places, responding to questions of class, gender, and ethnicity—and thereby potentially driving cultural displacement. Coming from this perspective, this paper uses computational critical discourse analysis to study how white and black hosts market black-majority neighborhoods in New York City on Airbnb, and how guests describe their consumption experience. The analysis shows how white entrepreneurs attempt to attract guests through a form of colonial discourse: exoticizing difference, emphasizing foreignness, and treating communities as consumable experiences for an outside group. White visitors, in turn, consume these cultural symbols to decorate their own identities of touristic consumption, describing themselves in colonial tropes of brave white adventurers exploring uncharted territories: glorious conquests no longer over gold and ivory, but over sandwiches at a local bodega. This situates Airbnb’s marketing at the urban frontier in a longer history of colonialism and racialized expropriation.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)553-572
Number of pages20
JournalEnvironment and Planning A: Economy and Space
Volume52
Issue number3
Early online date5 Jan 2020
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - May 2020
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Computational discourse analysis
  • Airbnb
  • Gentrification
  • Right to the city
  • Sharing economy
  • Race
  • Racism

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Selling black places on Airbnb: Colonial discourse and the marketing of black communities in New York City'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this